Between Acts

Archibald J. Motley, Jr.'s Between Acts invites the viewer into a dressing room in which two scantily clad African American female performers relax. A standing woman wearing a sheer pink body suit raises her arms to brush her hair as she gazes into a tall mirror over a dresser; her companion, one breast casually uncovered, assumes a casual pose in a chair as she indulges in a cigarette. Her virtual nudity is accentuated by contrast with her black stockings, rolled down below the knee; both women wear fashionable white shoes. Beyond the room's partly open door stands a caricaturish Black man, his back to the viewer and his head turned to the right to show a cigar jutting from his thick red lips. His top hat and cane, white gloves and too-short pants, all in parody of upper-class respectability, mark him as a minstrel performer, while the languidly posed semi-nude women are "exotic" dancers, paid to display their bodies on stage for the titillation of male viewers. Whereas Reginald Marsh depicted the raucous spectacle of vaudeville performance in his Pip and Flip (TF 1999.96) and Striptease at New Gotham (TF 1995.17), Between Acts implicates the viewer as a backstage voyeur, peering beyond a cropped negligee-draped chair at the lower right to snatch a close-up but secret glimpse behind the scenes.

The unsettling relationship between viewer and viewed in Between Acts creates a subtle tension that continues into the setting. The backstage dressing room is incongruously domestic, with its polished wood dresser and attached round-top mirror and candelabra, brightly colored circular rug (its central white bull's-eye circle exactly placed between the open legs of the standing woman), and Victorian-style oval framed portrait on the wall. The portrait's subject, a woman with her hair gathered into a bun and an oval broach on her dark dress, seems a foil to the two semi-nude dancers; except for the mirrored gaze of the standing woman, hers is the only glance toward the viewer. The mirror, however, reflects nothing but the woman posed before it, as if to confirm the fiction of the setting and of the viewer opposite it. Between Acts is an enigmatic image that challenges expectations and assumptions about people and place, roles and identity.

Motley used streamlined, stylized forms and eccentric color to endow his representations of leisure life in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood with a fantasy quality even as he addressed the social realities of African Americans. Beginning with his earliest works, portraits of mixed-race women he made in the 1920s, he explored subtle gradations of racial heritage and their implications for status within African American society. In his scenes of everyday life, he often contrasted buffoonish fat, dark-skinned men with alluring women whose light skin-tones he represented in reddish hues, as seen here. Fundamental to his academic training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the unclothed female figure was a recurring motif in Motley's art throughout his career. His pioneering representation of the sexualized Black female body confronted whites' racist stereotypes of uncontrolled "primitive" eroticism and celebrated the beauty of blackness through the medium of the nude.

The Art of Archibald Motley, Jr., Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venues:  Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois, October 23, 1991–March 17, 1992;  Venues: Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, New York; High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

A Case for Wine: from King Tut to Today The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, July 11–September 9, 2009.

Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (organizer). Venues: Nasher Art Museum at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, January 30–May 11, 2014; Amon Carter Museum of American Art,  Fort Worth, Texas, June 14–September 7, 2014; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, October 19, 2014–February 1, 2015; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, March 6–August 31, 2015; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, October 2, 2015–January 17, 2016. [exh. cat.]

"The Color Line" African-American Artists and civil rights in the United States, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France (organizer). Venue: Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France, October 4, 2016–January 15, 2017.  [exh. cat.]

In the Streets: Modern Life and Urban Experiences in the Art of the United States, 1893-1976 (Pelas ruas: vida moderna e experiências urbanas na arte dos Estados Unidos, 1893–1976). Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca de São Paulo (organizers). Venue: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, August 27, 2022–January 30, 2023. [exh. cat.]

     

Greenhouse, Wendy, and Jontyle Theresa Robinson. The Art of Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (exh. cat., Chicago Historical Society). Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1991. Text p. 107; ill. p. 107, no. 35 (color).

Mooney, Amy M. Archibald Motley, Jr. The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art: Volume IV. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2004. Text pp. 99, 101; ill p. 100, pl. 45 (color).

Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Text p. 42.

Schlabach, Elizabeth Schroeder. Along the Streets of Bronzeville: Black Chicago’s Literary Landscape. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Text p. 13.

Powell, Richard J., ed. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (exh. cat., Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University). Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2014. Text p. 159 (checklist); ill. p. 16, cat. no. 26 (color), p. 159 (checklist).

Wallace, Caroline. “Exhibiting Authenticity: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s Protests of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968–71.” Art Journal 74, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 5–23. Ill. p. 13 (color).

Soutif, Daniel.  The Color Line: Les Artistes Africains-Américains et la Ségrégation 1865–2016. (exh. cat. Musée du quai Branly). Paris:  Flammiron, 2016. ill. p. 117 (color).

Halasz, Piri. “Meet the Harlem Renaissance Artist Who Captured the Era of ‘Le Jazz Hot.’”. Observer (January 11, 2016). Accessed January 12, 2017. Text.

Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text pp. 214, 215; ill. p. 214, detail pp. 215–216 (color).

 Piccoli, Valéria, Fernanda Pitta, and Taylor Poulin. Pelas ruas: vida moderna e experiências urbanas na arte dos Estados Unidos, 1893-1976. (exh. cat., Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Terra Foundation for American Art). São Paulo, Brazil: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2022. Pl. p. 99 (color).